Love in Many Languages

by Jamie Bennett

  “Like that, Cooper. More like that, please,” I begged him, and when I did, he put his firm lips right around me and sucked. I felt it down to my toes again and I called out his name and came. He didn’t stop moving his mouth until I was just saying please, please, and tears were wetting the pillow under my head.

  Cooper moved above me and then I felt him inside me. “Oh, oh, God. Oh, Cooper.” It felt like we were made for each other. He pushed deep inside then moved his hips, rubbing his body against my clit, harder and faster, more and more. He rolled us until I was on top, and I sat up, my hair falling back, my hands on my breasts.

  “Ione, I want to feel you come.” He thrust up his hips and I gasped, then I think I was screaming, because he did it again and pinched my sensitive clit between his finger and thumb and I did come again, and kept coming as he flipped us back over and drove into me, saying my name and shuddering as he did, too.

  “Oh,” I sighed, hugging him, scratching my nails on his back. He picked up his head and leaned on his elbows, and smiled at me, that warm, wonderful smile.

  “That was good.”

  “That was…oh,” I said, ending again on a happy sigh. “Can we do it again?”

  Cooper laughed and eased out of me, eased off the condom, then relaxed on his back with me halfway on top of him. His fingers tangled in my hair and his other hand roamed, down to my butt, over my thigh, back to my breast resting on his chest. He kissed my forehead.

  “I knew it would be like that,” I said lazily.

  His fingers tweaked my nipple, making me jump and bite his pec. “No, you couldn’t have known it would be that good,” he told me.

  “I did. I wrote it in my planner.” I picked up my head and rummaged on the night stand for the little book that I had found in the studio.

  “You wrote that in your calendar?”

  I flipped to the page where I had written, “Japanese class! First day,” and showed him the writing underneath. “See?”

  “Is that in Polish?” he asked, squinting.

  “Oh, sorry. Yes, it says, ‘I’d like to sleep with this guy. It would be incredible.’”

  “How do I know that’s about me?” he challenged, and I bit his chest again. “You know, you speak Polish to me sometimes. When you’re tired, like when I was here and you were counting sheep, you started off saying numbers in English, but then you switched to another language that I didn’t recognize. Just now you were calling out something I didn’t understand, but I assumed that it meant things were good.”

  “I was? I did?” My mouth opened in amazement. “I had no idea that I lapsed into Polish! No one ever told me that before about sex, but no one ever made me come like that, either. I went out of my head a little. Your mouth is kind of amazing. And your penis is, too.” I shivered, thinking about his tongue, and how hard and big he had been inside me, hips pumping, the friction against all my best parts. I shivered again.

  “I will take that compliment any day,” he told me. He pressed my cheek to his chest and I smiled in happiness. “I can’t believe you wrote that, way back then. How did you know that, Io? You knew right away that we should be together.”

  “Well, I just…I don’t want to say that I saw it, because I don’t believe in that anymore. I don’t really think I have any special knowledge of people.”

  “I think you do.”

  “I’ve been wrong about a lot of things,” I said, thinking back to the list I had recited to Karis.

  “Maybe you’ve been wrong about some things. I think you may have seen too much good in people. But I’m still not sure that it’s a failing.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “I know that you see a lot more than I do. You knew that the two of us should, uh—”

  “This,” I said, and now I bit his nipple lightly.

  “Yes, and more. How did you see that?”

  I shrugged my shoulder against him. “You just did it for me, Cooper. But I didn’t for you, not at first.”

  He was quiet for a moment. “No, that’s not true. You did it for me, but I thought you were kidding.”

  I picked up my head and twisted to look in his face. “What do you mean?”

  “I thought you were teasing, about being into me. Or, I guess, being flirty to get my notes, or something like that.”

  I felt something inside me shrink.

  “Don’t look at me like that, sweetheart,” Cooper said. “I didn’t think it for long. I couldn’t believe you were real. I was feeling like everything had spun almost completely out of my control with my family and my business, and then I found myself sitting in a class where I had no goddamn idea what was going on. And there you were. This beautiful, engaging, friendly, funny woman, acting like I was the best thing she’d ever seen.”

  “I liked you,” I said softly, with an ache in my chest that came out in my voice. “I didn’t try to hide it. See? I was doing that wrong, too.”

  Cooper rolled on his side, and lifted me up until we were face to face on the pillow. “You weren’t doing anything wrong. You wear your heart on your sleeve. I love that about you.” He tucked a lock of my hair behind my ear. “I finally realized that you were genuine, real, that you weren’t interested in anything other than me. Just me. But that was when I also started telling myself that I didn’t have time or bandwidth for a relationship or even a dinner out, that I had too many responsibilities and not enough hours in the day for them all. Tanner said I was a stupid asshat and that there was something wrong with me for not going right back after you.”

  “You’re not a stupid asshat.”

  “Yeah, I was. I was feeling overwhelmed with every single part of my life and I thought...”

  “You didn’t have time for me. For a girlfriend, that was what you said,” I remembered.

  “It wasn’t really that I didn’t have time. It was me thinking that I couldn’t deal with one more thing. But then, when I saw you with Ash at Digger’s party, I wanted to beat him into the ground and carry you away over my shoulder.”

  “You got all caveman.” It made me want to bite him again.

  He smiled a little but his face turned very serious. “Then I found you hurt. I thought…” He stopped for a moment. “I knew what kind of an idiot I was. You’re not one more thing to deal with. You’re what makes me happy. You make me so happy, Ione.” He leaned across the bed and kissed me and his hands got busy.

  I ended up yelling some more, probably in Polish.

  ∞

  I hung up the phone with the doctor’s office. I had cancelled my appointment for her to look at my scar, for now. Maybe later I would want to think about it again, but I didn’t feel any pressing need.

  “Ione?” Dov stood at my desk, shifting from foot to foot. “Um, I brought you some tea.”

  “Thanks.” I didn’t move to pick up the paper cup. “Are you talking to me again now?”

  “What?” he asked, but he blushed, so I knew he understood what I meant.

  “I guess I don’t look as scary and gross as I used to,” I said, “so you think that we can hang out together again.”

  “That wasn’t why,” he mumbled. He didn’t meet my eyes.

  “It really hurt my feelings. I was already pretty down, and I thought you were my friend. Then you ignored me for weeks, Dov. That sucked.”

  He finally looked right at my face. “I’m sorry. I’m very, very sorry. I got really freaked out.”

  “Yeah, me too,” I told him. “I was really scared and I could have used the support, rather than thinking that you only liked me when I was pretty. Thank you for the tea.” I looked back at my computer screen, trying to focus on what had happened to the invoices that I was supposed to be finding, but feeling like I was going to cry.

  Dov hadn’t moved. “That’s not what I like about you. Not the only thing.” He clenched his jaw. “It made me upset, like it was hard to look at you and talk to you, thinking of how badly you had been hurt.”

  “You should have to
ld me that.”

  “I should have.” He paused. “I heard you’re going out with that guy, the one who comes by all the time.”

  “Yes.” I scrolled down, puzzled. They had to be here somewhere. “He doesn’t care about how I look. That’s one of the reasons I love him.”

  “You love him?”

  “Of course I do!” I looked up from the screen. “He’s the best person in the whole world.”

  Dov’s neck moved as he swallowed. “I’m glad. And I’m really sorry.” He leaned over my desk to look at my computer. “Can I help you with something?”

  “I can’t find all the paper delivery invoices. I was sure that they were in here, somewhere.” I flicked the glass of the screen with my finger, but that didn’t help.

  “I can take a look.” He stepped behind my desk and slid the keyboard over to himself. He typed for a while and we both looked at the screen. “I, um, I also realized I had been behaving like a real ass around you. Pretty focused on the external, as you’ve sometimes said. I didn’t realize that I was so shallow,” he mentioned, and when I looked at him, he was blushing again.

  “That’s something good to work on. I have a lot I’m trying to improve about myself. I guess we’re all kind of works in progress but it’s good to recognize what needs some tweaks.”

  He nodded. “I am working on it.” He moved the cursor and clicked open the invoices. “There they are. Did you hear that our guitar playing app moved up six places the usage chart?”

  “That’s wonderful!” I said. I took a sip of tea, and he had remembered the kind I liked.

  Chapter 15

  Even with the air conditioning, even with the fans, my kitchen was broiling. That was what happened when you tried to cook dinner for six people when it was 400 degrees outside. The new curtains that Mette had dropped off did block a lot of the burning sun coming in the windows, but I had realized something when she came over to hang them the day before.

  “You don’t like them,” Mette had said, watching me.

  “You sewed them beautifully. And they look almost identical to what my grandma had here for all those years.” I looked at the heavy fabric of red, gold, brown, and green leaves. “But no, I don’t. I guess I never liked the old ones very much either. I’m definitely going to use them,” I said quickly. “I’m so grateful that you made them for me and thank you!”

  Mette had laughed. “Lucky for you, I like them, very much. When I laid out the fabric, it didn’t really remind me of you. So I made a very big hem at the bottom and they will fit my dining room windows perfectly once I let them down.” She reached up to pat my cheek. “Let’s hang them here until you find the material that you like, then you’ll come to my house and we’ll sew the new ones together. It won’t take any time at all.”

  Maybe something gauzier for the fabric, I thought now. Like the scarves I wore. Augusta would call them hippie curtains, and that thought made me smile.

  My phone rang and I expected to see Cooper’s number, but it wasn’t. “Ash?”

  “Hi, Ione,” he answered. “I have some news.” There was a pause. “We got him.”

  I sat down hard in the chair at the kitchen table, and I must have dropped the phone, because all of a sudden I realized that Ash’s voice was coming from somewhere down by my feet. “Hello? Hello?” he was saying loudly.

  I retrieved it. “I’m here. I almost fainted.”

  “Are you all right?” Ash demanded. “Put your head between your knees.”

  “No, I’m ok. I’m fine,” I said, and then I knew that I meant it. Maybe not all the way, but a lot, and getting more all the time. I took a deep breath. “Tell me what happened.”

  “Corrie turned him in. She showed up at DPD and said she knew someone who was wanted, and she knew where he was. They called me when they ran the name and I watched him get picked up. He was asleep and it went down very easy.”

  “What about Corrie? Where is she?” I sat up straight.

  Ash sighed. “She had some warrants out on her, Ione. Right now she’s in juvenile detention.”

  “Did she know that when she went and turned him in? Did she know that she’d get in trouble, too?”

  “I believe that she did.”

  I nodded, then remembered he couldn’t see me. “That was brave of her,” I said.

  “I went to see her. She asked me how you were doing and I told her that you’re doing better.”

  “I’m doing well,” I corrected. “What else did Corrie say?”

  “She told me about some other things that her boyfriend has been up to. Hopefully they can charge him with more. She’s terrified of him, and she should be. He was furious that we were after him so hard, after he attacked you. He’s been pretty much underground, very limited in what he could do and where he could go, and he was blaming you for it. She said she couldn’t risk you getting hurt again so she turned him in. She had already called had to warn you.”

  “That’s why she called me? She thought he was going to…”

  “That’s why Corrie called you,” he agreed. “He was so pissed off she was afraid he was going to go back for round two. She also wanted to hear for herself if you were all right.” Ash hesitated. “She claims she had no idea what he was going to do that night, Ione, that night he assaulted you. She said they got in the car and pulled up at your house, and that was when he told her that he was tired of you ‘interfering’ in their relationship, and asked how much cash and jewelry you kept around. She said that she was trying to get him to stop and leave you alone. I’ve heard a lot of sob stories from a lot of people, saying how it wasn’t their fault, but I believe her.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “You had been telling me right along that she wasn’t to blame. I’m still not thrilled with her part in this, but I’m going to put in a good word for her. I’ll talk to her lawyer, too.”

  “I want to, also. I want to help her,” I said.

  “That will mean a lot, coming from the victim. You’re a bigger person than I could be, Ione.”

  “No. I’m also very angry at her, and I want to tell her that to her face. I want her to know that she should have stepped up sooner to help me. Because if Cooper hadn’t come when he did, I don’t know what would have happened. But she did step up now, and that means something—it means a lot to me. And I understand her fear, as much as I can, anyway.”

  Ash and I talked for a while longer about what would happen next and what I should do. “Thank you,” I said, before we hung up. “You’ve taken such an interest in this, and I don’t think he would have been caught without your work on it.”

  “Any friend of Digger’s is a friend of mine. It was lucky we met at his house.”

  “Lucky for me in two ways, because that night also made Cooper start to see me differently. We’re together,” I explained.

  Ash laughed. “I heard that, from Digger and from the man himself. He’s been calling me to check in on things, pretty worried about you. Funny how the party that night worked out for both of us. In fact, I need to go pick up Tracey right now for dinner, because it made her start rethinking things, too.”

  “Oh, I knew she was into you!” And I remembered that I had known it that night at the party, because I had seen how she looked at Ash, and how she looked at me because I was sitting next to him. Maybe I had been right about a few things.

  After we hung up, I went into the dining room, which was now really a dining room again because Cooper and Tanner had moved my new bed upstairs into the green room. Cooper had suggested burning the mattresses that had been in that bedroom and I had to agree with that idea, so they were gone (but just hauled away, not burned). And sleeping in the room with the green walls was something I was enjoying, so I was reconsidering my thought that I would go back to the pink of my childhood. Maybe I would keep it green, but I had a lot of choices.

  For now, we had set up a dining room table with some plywood and sawhorses unearthed in the excavation of my back yard. Chairs w
ere in short supply, but I already thought that the dining room was pretty perfect, because very soon it would be full of some of the people I cared most about in the world. I straightened one of my paintings, which Cooper had brought down from the studio and hung up on the wall, and then sat on one of the crates we had pulled in to use as a chair. They had caught him. I exhaled. I hadn’t realized the weight on me until it was gone. He was locked up, and I was free of him. I texted Cooper to tell him, but I knew that he had meetings, so I didn’t expect him to answer right away.

  Sitting at the bare, plywood table made me wonder again about my grandma’s scalloped tablecloth. Maybe I had it around, somewhere, still. I walked down into the basement, never my favorite place, and quickly glanced around at the shelves that were pretty bare except for some broken glass from old jars, rusty pieces and parts that must have been my grandpa’s, and dead bugs. Yuck. When I pulled on the string that lit up the single bulb, I saw that the little closet where Fox had stored his stuff was almost empty, too. The only thing left was a shoebox, which had one bowling shoe inside it.

  I carried the shoe upstairs with me and remembered the cardboard box of my grandma’s belongings. Cooper and I had pushed it out from under my bed in the dining room and he had carried it back upstairs to the green bedroom for me. I hadn’t opened it, not since he had gotten it out of my studio a few weeks before. I left the golf shoe downstairs, ran up to the green bedroom, and knelt next to the box, putting my hand on the taped lid. I had piled things into it when she had died, a hodgepodge of stuff from around the house. I remembered walking through different rooms, picking up items and dropping them in, crying and sobbing, then sealing it shut. I ran my finger over the many layers of tape I had put on then, trying to close everything in rather than letting my heart be open. It had been a mistake. It was silly not to open it now, because I needed to let it all out. I went to the studio and got my palette knife to slit the tape.